27 January 2015

Polish Palimpsest: Iwanowski and Pawlikowski

In 2013 the Polish photographer Michal Iwanowski (b. 1977) set out to retrace the journey taken by his grandfather and his uncle after they escaped from a prisoner of war camp in Kaluga, southwest of Moscow. Anatole and Wiktor had no way of knowing whether they would be able to make their way home to Poland in the tumultuous final months of World War II, but they were determined to die trying. Their 2200 kilometer trek took the two men through Belarus and Lithuania and all the way to Wroclaw where they were ultimately reunited with their relatives.

They made their journey on foot, moving mostly at night. With no way to know who might be friend or foe, they avoided all human contact; hence Iwanowiski's title for this photo portfolio: Clear of People. The men survived on a meager diet of wild berries and mushrooms, and the occasional stolen potato or cabbage. What preserved their spirits through cold, dark and sleeping on the ground was the strength of their mutual bond and, perhaps, the diary in which Wiktor chronicled it all.

In his introduction to the exhibition of Clear of People, Iwanowski writes that his grandfather lived a long life in Wroclaw, surviving until the age of ninety-two and that his uncle Wiktor is still living in Szczecin, Poland. Clear of People was presented in February 2014 at Ffotogallery, University of Wales, Newport. Iwanowski, who lives in Cardiff, was supported in this project in part by the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture.

At about he same time that Iwanowski was moving from west to east across Central Europe, Polish filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski (b. 1957) was tracing a similar path in the other direction. To make Ida (pronounced Ee-da) Pawlikowski returned to his native country for the first time since childhood. Although the film is set in the early 1960s just as youth culture was beginning to trickle through the Iron Curtain, the Polish countryside appears impervious to the passing of time.

The filmmaker's own mixed ancestry led him to the relationship between
Catholics and anti-antisemitism . "I come from a magnetic field of
Catholicism, " Pawlikowski says, adding that his father's mother died in
Auschwitz.
A film needs a narrative hook to hang more on than photograph does, so Pawlikowski created two characters loosely based on two people he has known: a Catholic priest and a former prosecutor, Teresa Wolinska.

Anna, a novice,
played by first-time actress Agata Trzebuchowska, has been raised in a convent
to a religious vocation.She knows that
she was abandoned there as a baby, but no more than that. As Anna preparesfor her final vows, the prioress sends her to
Lodz to meet her only surviving relative, Wanda Gruz.

Wanda, played
brilliantly by Agata Kulesza, reveals to the young woman that her real name is
Ida Lebenstein and that her parents were killed during WW!!. snorts derisively“A Jewish nun,”she says derisively.Wanda is also no longer the person she once
was; a former state prosecutor for the Communist regime who staged show trials
that sent innocent people their deaths, she has fallen out of favor with the
Party,demoted to presiding over petty
domestic disputes.She drinks and picks
up faceless menbut her anguish has less
to do with guilt over theblood on her
hands than with the fate of her sister, Ida’s mother.

Their road trip in
search of the truth takes them through the bleak countryside andbrutal urban architecture of Communist Poland.In her nun's habit, Ida elicits reflexive
respect from people but it is Wanda, wrapped in the tattered shreds of her judicial authority, who intimidates
information out of anyone who would obstruct her.When they eventually track down the farmer who appropriated the Lebensteins’ farm, he is dying so Wanda pitilessly wrings
the truth out of his son:Ida
survivedthrough the kindness of the man
who killed her parents because she was the kind of Jewish little girl; she
looked Christian and could pass.Her parentswere killed because they could not.

This is not a film
about salvation through religion or divine love; history does not allow
it.In the final scene as Ida flees
Lodz, her agitation surfacing at last, we see a godless landscape.

The cinematographers
used the unusual aspect ratioof1.37:1 and static camera shots, effectively
weighing the characters down to the lower part of the screen, suggesting the weight of Polish history.Shot in natural light, the framing is all right
angles and parallel lines; window
frames, doorways, railings, and even the trees appear to stand up straighter.
Only during Ida’s final flight from Lodz does the camera mimic her agitation.

Ida, a film that cost $1.8 million dollars to produce, has just
been nominated for an Oscar as Best Foreign Film.

2 comments:

Tania, I saw "Ida" by accident before I read anything about becuase the DVD was at my local library. The movie has its own website (ida-movie.com.)I also saw the Belgian film "Broken Circle Breakdown the same way. I loved that one, too!

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